Pomme Inversion
by Fwe
Summary: The pyreflies hadn't come until after the city had exploded. She liked to think that it was because so many people came there to remember. Aurikku.


Pomme Inversion

Disclaimer: I don't own Final Fantasy X.

A/N: This started out as a challenge response for something else and ended up as a response to a different challenge by bacon-meister on LJ. And mucho thanks to morbidflower (baneberry64 here) for her very kind opinion and help with this piece. You're two are too awesome. This is dedicated to you. :)

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With the sun shining in her face and the dust jamming itself up her nose, she found it rather hard to enjoy herself, especially with nature gritting between her teeth. Streamers of color floated off of the air toward her as the sunlight drifted along, and she envied it its brightness. If anything, she wanted to be bright, and she didn't think she was doing such a good job anymore.

Her legs were covered with a mile of dirt, and her face looked like it had been through a war with the ground, but her strides were long and her voice was high as she sang a song to nobody, arms swinging at her sides, albeit a little slowly. The desert wasn't her home anymore, but she could pretend it was for now. She didn't think anyone would mind so terribly, especially since there was no one but the rubble to hear her.

The old metal buildings glinted from where they had fallen to the ground, still and eerie in their incompleteness. The city had been leveled, and even now she could see the difference in the sand where a dark ring lay around the outskirts of the blast, and at the center, where a patch of glass lay merged with the ground.

The memories here, she could feel them reaching for her to think of them. It was like a friend calling from far away, and just as easily she could ignore them by turning in another direction. Moving quickly, names of places only marked by tiny landmarks, she took a stroll down another demolished lane, walking across the site of another non-existent building, careful not to cut herself on the bits of things that still stuck up every now and then. Somehow, she found it disturbing that they all bent in the same direction.

Crawling slowly across the endless streets and pouring half of her thoughts into not thinking, she distracted herself by placing things inside of her pockets. She felt the things, secret to her, and held them in her fingers like talismans, gripping the magic from them and drinking it in like liquid life.

The light changed as she came to the outskirts, where the ring stopped suddenly to spread out, and the ellipse was like a string of black on porcelain. Behind her, her footsteps seemed endless, and the wind blew them backward, scattering into nothing.

She'd crossed the diameter, and here she found a graveyard.

Little piles of things sprouted up like flowers every now and again, here and there, wilting just like colorful petals and melting in the sun because plastic did tend to do that when it got hot. They were bits of things blown out from the blast, and the sole survivors in a city of mechanical souls.

She sidled carefully left to right, feet kicking dust into her eyes, and for a moment, she doubted what she was about to do. Eyes burning a hole into someone's lost kitchenware, she felt absolutely awful as she pushed her way into the scarce junkyard of memories and laid out a plot for herself.

She looked around a moment, scratching her face and burying her feet as far as she could into the sand, and wished silently that she had someone to pray to so she could ask for forgiveness, and maybe even a little guidance.

Settling herself upon the ground, she pulled her pockets outward, and hoped to wherever that Bob the God wouldn't smite her with lightning. She cast her eyes upward and prayed to Bob that she was doing good, and that if Bob was a girl that he would forgive her for naming her that.

Pockets empty, head pounding, and heart full of knowing what to do, Rikku slid the straps from her shoulders, and a backpack slid to the ground from her back, half crumpling where the air touched nothing inside. She laid the things from her pockets carefully out in a semi-circle with her feet, mentally counting something and closing her eyes when she lost count. Quickly she turned around, and vanished into the inner circle for just a moment longer.

She came back carrying the shining metal disk, and the rock she found to prop it up on was smooth and scorched. Quietly, she pulled a stick of something out and placed the tip upon it. There was a short hiss as it touched the surface. A few deft dashes and she had herself a picture.

Tilting her head on the side, she smiled. "Hey, Auron. Long time no see."

The lipstick she'd drawn in dripped in reply, and the red stick figure scowled upon the plate. Rikku frowned and drew her thumb across the dribble. It looked as if he'd been drinking blood. Or maybe eating little girls alive. Yeah, Rikku found that one fitting. Maybe just their hearts.

She smiled her biggest smile and bowed down before her makeshift dead man, she wiped a bit of dust from her shorts like they weren't caked with it in the first place. "How's being dead going for ya? I bet the Farplane's kinda itchy, but I guess since you're not really there, that's all right." She paused. "You're not itchy, are you, Auron?"

Another blob of lipstick fell and Rikku scratched her head. "Yeah, stupid question." As she sat upon the ground, the minutes passing and nothing happening except maybe the growing need to itch herself now that she had mentioned it, and Rikku found the silence to be increasingly moist. Not tense, like the muscles in her neck, or long, like the stretch of nothing behind her, but moist. Moist like fruitcake, moist like spit, moist like the air after a thunderstorm, which she never liked to smell. It was moist with sweat and tears, waiting and nothing- saturated with nothing- and the minutes positively squished as they ran into each other, looking for an escape from the cosmic hourglass.

Rikku folded her legs beneath her and brought out something from her backpack. Slowly, she held it out.

"Um… here. I…took it from you a while ago. I guess you… might want it back." She slid it across the ground, the sand carrying it along like prickly water.

Auron's sticky good eye (the one that wasn't a smudgy 'x') gazed out from his scorching throne and Bob the God gave a thumbs down in disapproval. Before the Almighty and the All-Deadified lay an inconspicuous piece of something which was at once both frighteningly familiar and disturbingly strange. It was a shriveled apple, nearly round but not nearly alive enough to make anyone want to touch it.

Rikku smiled, and had the real Auron been there, perhaps he would have backed away a bit. Lipstick Auron on the other hand, continued to drip.

The minutes flew by.

"Mmm…" Rikku shifted, the scent of rotten fruit drifting up her nose no matter which way she moved. Looking past the frozen mis-matched eyes, she didn't want to admit that she thought maybe Auron would smell like that now if he'd had a body to rot.

Lucky for her, she'd never have the opportunity to know if she was right.

"Er…" she cleared her throat. "I took some other stuff, too, but I don't think you'd like to have that back." She blushed in front of her stick figure friend, and tried not to imagine him actually there. It was kind of easy, because no one had ever made the claim that Rikku could draw, lipstick color number forty-five or no.

The silence silently went on.

The sun continued to beat her over the head with a hammer full of 'wow, that's hot' and silently she seethed to herself that she should have done this at night.

She switched her attention back to the present. "You're probably wondering why I'm here with you." Auron-thing melted patiently. "Well, truth is, I'm not quite sure." Auron-thing called her daft, and she smacked it, immediately deciding that that was the wrong thing to do when Auron-thing ceased to have a mouth to call her stupid with. Quickly she drew it back on. "Sorry," she said.

She cleared her throat. "Anyway, you shouldn't be making fun of me." Poor Auron-thing didn't know, so Rikku shook her head. "Okay, so I do have a plan, but you still shouldn't make fun of me, because I'm too cute to make fun of, right?"

The minutes positively dragged.

She harrumphed. "Yeah, okay, but I do have a reason." Auron-thing asked her to get on with it, and Rikku decided that Auron-thing was acting very un-Auron-like. "Impatience never got anyone anywhere, Auron."

Looking up at the sun, she was semi-surprised to see it falling lower, and more than semi-surprised to find that even for how long she'd been away from home, her skin hadn't peeled off from the heat.

"Okay, it's like this," she settled back onto the sand. "I think you need a place to stay, like… forever, and I know you've got the Farplane and everything, but I can't really go in there, so I'm thinking a little relocation is in order, except you're not really going to be here and-" She was rambling and she knew it and, Yevon and Fayth why couldn't she just spit it out? "Well, here."

She dug a hole in the sand. "I know it's not much," she said, "but it's a place for me to visit, I guess, and you might not approve but I guess you can't really do much about that anymore, can you?" He didn't answer. She looked down. "Yeah…"

The wind buffeted off of her slightly, moving the feathers at her neck until they tickled but still she didn't move, staring suddenly at his one dripping eye until she could have sworn it blinked. Silently, she placed the apple into the hole. It went in with a dull thud, sending up little dusty clouds that made her think of smoke bombs and then settled to a stop, looking lonely and shriveled and soon to be very dirt covered.

"You probably don't want that, but it's the thought that counts, right? Pops says that that's always what matters." She guessed silently that she believed it, too. "Well," she said. "I guess I did want to give you one other thing…" She reached for the sack again, delaying slightly and feeling those dripping eyes upon her and the skin crawl upon her skin. It wasn't so long before that she wouldn't have minded the attention, but all alone and with the real thing gone, yeah. It was a little disconcerting. Silently, she grimaced to herself. What was the world coming to when she couldn't even say goodbye to people anymore? You'd think that she'd be use to it by now.

She wondered if you ever got use to that sort of thing.

Reaching inside at Auron thing's prompt, she pulled out a bracelet made of knotted string and then a vile of something. She held her hands up in front of her. "Before you get all grumpy on me, don't freak out, okay? It's not anything gross. It's holy water, see?" She held the vile up to his eyes. The stuff inside looked as if it was the least holy thing to ever exist but at least Auron thing had the manners not to admit it. He remained silent for a while, then when the wind picked up again she realized that he likely wouldn't say anything at all and felt herself blush a little.

"I guess it could use a little explanation, huh?" she asked. Auron said that that would be nice and she nodded. "Well," she said, awkwardly. "Don't laugh- too cute, remember?- but this was a piece of string from your coat." She paused. "Hey! I said don't laugh!" She smacked him again, hard enough to make the back of her hand smart where his red outline stayed imprinted onto her skin. She looked down at her hand, dissatisfied, and wondered if other girls had this trouble burying their friends. "Tradition," she reminded him loudly with a shake of her still smarting fist. With one last chuckle, he quieted down, listening as she settled back into the sand. "Well," she said. "It's a memory string. Al Bhed stuff, you know? Every knot in it is supposed to be a memory that I have of you that I liked." She looked down at it. "I have a lot, huh?" She felt that blush coming back and bludgeoned it over the head with a fist shaped hammer. Now that she had his attention, she wasn't going to let it slip away, even if she had smeared both of his eyes off onto the back of her hand. She hummed impatiently to herself. "Anyway, I'm supposed to tell you what these represent." The sentence had come out a bit fast- more of a hum than a sentence- and she preferred it that way. The less she had to say, the quicker she could be done.

She picked the string up again. "Okay, this one. Right here? Yeah. That's when I met you. And this one? That's when you sat with me on the steps outside of the Farplane. Do you remember that?" He remained silent so she went on, down the line to the third knot then the fourth and fifth and sixth until she's gone down the entire string, thirty knots in all, filled with conversation of filched fish and failed cooking experiments for the whole group. Something had collected in the back of her throat by the end, lodging itself there firmly until it felt as if the apple had somehow found itself stuck there by mistake. She looked down at it suspiciously and then at him, sniffing slightly and nearly blushing again.

"Sorry." She wiped at her eyes with the backs of two fists harshly, attempting to look like the brave girl and somehow managed to smear the wetness there only farther down her cheeks until she had two perfect patches of mud upon her skin, coated in silver sunset. She wiped them dry, holding her head up high and smiling. "That's why I told you never to talk about that underwear incident again," she said. "I told you I'd start crying." There had been no underwear incident and they both knew it very well but she couldn't for the life of her think of what she had just been talking about for the past half hour or so.

It had all come out in one big jumble the size of a world-class stew, big enough to feed every man and woman on the planet three times over. Stuff had been said that she would have rather forgotten and things had been left out that she would have liked to have said, but it was over now except for one little item- the last knot at the end of the incredibly long string that looked worn and finger patted and dirty so that it looked also incredibly loved.

She took a deep breath, looking at it. "Should I?" she said. No one objected. Of course, no one had ever told her that she had to say these things out loud, either. And no one had even said that she needed to do this. But it was more than tradition for her. It was finality. Closure.

Closure was important, wasn't it? Every story needed an ending. Every question an answer. Every arm a hand. Every leg a foot. Every… well.

Running out of closure analogies was only one way of stalling, but she supposed that if she had really felt like stalling she would have pulled out the world's largest filibuster and simply recited the names of every person she had ever done this for in the first place.

It was a long list and there must have been a thousand miles of string laying somewhere under the ground by now, rotting away with holy water spread over every knot to seal every memory into everlasting rest.

Well, here she was with her one last piece of string lying uselessly in her hands and she wondered silently if she even wanted to seal it. That would require speaking it, of course, and that only made her blush beat her over the head in return. Wincing, she fingered the knot, looking down at the evil, laughing apple and the silently chuckling Auron thing and contemplated throwing it all into the hole and leaving well enough alone. Well, that idea lasted about as long as the remainder of the daylight as she suddenly found herself sitting in the dark with a thousand pyreflies for company and a thousand thoughts to match them.

"Auron, you… you meanie bucket," she whispered to him, kicking him slightly with the tip of one foot. "It's all your fault that I have a problem anyway." He didn't stare at her or laugh at her- missing both his eyes and mouth- but her hand did where the rest of him lay in an angry, lipsticky smear. She looked at it in despair, feeling her stomach twist up into a drum tight, pickled up, worried mess and silently she stared up at the sky, hoping that Bob might actually strike her down and spare her the ridiculousness of it all.

The pyreflies bobbed overhead of her, each in a silent salute to her simultaneous courage and cowardice and somehow each of them made her decide then and there to be quiet forever more. What was the use of speaking when you couldn't ever get out exactly what you wanted to say, anyway? No one would ever understand what she meant by this or meant by that and- Why in the world couldn't she just spit her memories out into little pyreflies and just jam them into the ground and be done with it?

Why did everything have to be so difficult?

So, she spit it out like a bad lemon and a bad memory simultaneously, thinking that they both tasted exactly the same but knowing that she tasted something completely different, really. This wasn't a bad memory, after all. It wasn't a lemon, either. It was just difficult and maybe sacred and maybe a lot of both. She never did anything in little proportions and she cursed herself for it.

"Well," she said, "here goes nothing." So, she told him.

And it hurt.

Afterward, there was silence.

She looked up at the sky, again, blushing so hard her cheeks looked like lobster backs and clenching her fists so far into the dust and sand that she had her arms buried up to the elbows.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" she asked him, eventually. He'd been remarkably contributing so far, after all, and she did ever so enjoy being laughed at. She waited, feeling the air begin to cool upon her cheeks and her cheeks cool upon the air and thought it a fair trade. There was the matter of pulling his mouth out of the sand first, though, before he could answer her properly and she remembered it with a sudden gasp. She looked down rapidly, pulling her hands from the dark, night sand and brushing his face off with a slight apology. "I'll buy you some new lipstick every month, okay? I promise! All of the other dead guys will be jealous." He scowled at her, something which she found disconcerting, and she nodded. "Every week, then." It sounded like a good idea to him, so he let it go, looking just smudgy instead of stoic. She wondered if it were a good sign or one that he needed a fresh coat. Either way, she felt her blush returning. "Well?" she asked. His little boxed eye stared up at her.

A noise behind her startled her, nearly so badly that she almost poured her holy water into her eyes. Luckily for her, she righted herself quickly, standing with a whirl and looking around with the vile stashed back in her belt like a good little thief.

"Hello?"

There was no answer and nothing but the pyreflies to continue staring, Auron thing having been robbed of that capability. She looked out, staring at the Al Bhed city wreckage and then the horizon with crafty, green-swirled eyes and then blinked, sitting down again. She shifted a toe in the sand.

"You know, Auron?" she said, looking down at her apple, "I think that you're driving me crazy." She looked up at his sticky, boxy shape on the metal, waiting for a response and then sighed. "This is stupid." Silently, she poured the last drop of holy water onto the last knot and threw it unceremoniously into the hole, covering it liberally with dirt and stamping it angrily with a foot. "There!" she yelled. "I hope you're happy, you big meanie! I just told you my greatest memory of you and you never even told me how you felt! Well, you know what? I'm going to tell you how I felt. So… yeah!" She looked doubtfully down to the ground and then held her head up high. "I think I loved you. You heard me right. Love." She stretched the last word out into a long chant, ending it with a harsh click of her teeth and then sat once again, pointing at him. "It's all your fault I figured it out too late, too."

He stood firm upon his platter, not moving as the wind blew her braids into her face and as she unstuck them from her lip-gloss and her tears. She sniffed. "Yeah, well, that's how I feel," she muttered, picking up her bag again and hefting it to her shoulders. Quietly, she looked up again. The pyreflies danced, unperturbed by her rant and she scowled at them. They hadn't existed before the explosion. And if they had, she'd never seen them. Was it any wonder, thought, she asked herself, with all of the people that came there to remember? It was like a melting pot of memories were floating above her, each one with a different thing to say. Silently, she wondered if any of them were hers.

With one foot, she brought the bottom end of Auron-thing out from beneath him and pushed him silently over top of it. "There," she said, satisfied. "Now I'm done and I can move one and you can be dead." Standing to her full length, she pulled her braids silently behind her back and flung them over top of her backpack.

All right. So this was her ending. This was her foot and hand and answer. This was her answer to everything. She'd bury her memories so that she could remember him and she'd be done. She'd go home and wash her hands and hair and face and then cut all of her braids off to remember him and be done. A week from now she'd buy him his new lipstick shade and a week after that and a week after that and a week after that until she had made herself forget that she loved him- even just a little, and even if it did turn out to be just a little crush- and she would be at her story's end.

The End. Silently, she turned her back from him. "I'll be back, later," she said. "See ya, dead guy."

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She swung back, dropping to her knees with a thunk that left apple shaded marks on her skin and sand inside of her shoes. As her lips hit the cool metal of what would have been Auron thing's mouth, she wondered to herself if lives were allowed to have epilogues.

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Memory Thirty:

(She grabbed his face with her hands, past patience, into desperation. He let her hang there a moment, his lips bleeding where they had hit his teeth, staining her perfect lips a cherry color to match their flavor. He could smell chamomile on her, and something like smoke bombs exploding. It was her first kiss. )

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The night air was balmy, nearly so hot that she felt like crying. It had been a week, already. Seven days. Six days, six hours, and six minutes, if she had had anything to say about it. Silently, she picked up her backpack, intending to fill it to the brim with lipstick of every color until Auron thing could decide on the correct shade for his complexion.

"Definitely Yunie's area of expertise," she told herself and tried not to think too hard about what she was going to say when she got to where she was going.

Quietly, she opened up the top.

A note fluttered into the open.

Her fingers stopped moving. "What?"

The little piece of paper fluttered in the breeze, tips white and crisp and shining like stars and moonlight and all of the lovely things that she could ever think about and silently she edged a hand forward.

She'd never been good at words. Never at saying witty things or remembering them, either, but she could tell when others had said them and how the words were supposed to sound.

'I remember' was written on the front, looking as faint and light as if it didn't exist at all and looking much too much like something she had never been good at.

Rikku's eyes burned as she looked at it, as if it was as bight as fire, holding a gasp in until she nearly exploded. She sat down silently, opening it up the rest of the way and read, feeling her heart beat once, twice, three times, not at all, until she was left with one tear down her face and a smile that looked like the sun.

The paper was empty, all but for a small sentence on the bottom of the page, and her heart soared, not knowing whether it should take off or to stay but going as high as it could anyway, toward the sun that wasn't up and the moon that kissed it as it left for the stars.

'Maybe we'll find a way' was a beautiful way to start out a new journey- One that started in a desert and ended where she didn't know. She put her backpack on, repeating the phrase to herself, savoring the flavor of it until it sounded almost like a promise. It tasted almost like memories.

Without another word, nor a single tube of lipstick, she headed out toward the desert, wondering if she would find him there. And maybe, that was how it was suppose to be.

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I remember.

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Rikku smiled.

(Smiled- Csemat)

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A/N:So... what do you all think, though? It turned out very different from what I first intended. Con crit is mucho appreciated. Thanks for reading!

Note for 12/30/06: I changed some things around, if you were wondering why I updated this. I wasn't satisfied with what I'd had before. I hope it doesn't cause anyone problems. If it does, please just try and ignore me. Tell me if you find anything wrong wtih my new version, please. Any help is appreciated. :)

Note for 1/1/07: I toned it down considerably. If I took too much out, tell me. I'm pretty sure that this is the best that it's going to get, though. ;) Well… woohoo…


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